The Peruvian commandos waited all night under the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, hunkered down in a winding, steel-braced tunnel complex. Loaded down with weapons, ammunition and body armor, they still had enough room to rest and try to sleep. The tunnels were the work of professional miners, and the troops could walk upright, two abreast, through lighted and ventilated chambers. In the morning, after a final planning session, their officers slipped through nearby buildings and into the tunnels to join the 140 army, navy and air-force special-operations forces underground for the attack. Lieut. Colonel Juan Valer Sandoval, leader of a squad, sat down to write a farewell to the men he had trained with for months. "If tomorrow you read this letter," he began, "it will be because I have already died."
Up above, intelligence officers were listening to the microphones they had smuggled into the residence, tracking the movements of the 14 Tupac Amaru guerrillas and their 72 VIP hostages. The officers knew what to expect: by midafternoon the hostages would be in upstairs bedrooms and the rebels who were holding them prisoner would have started their regular makeshift soccer game in the spacious ground-floor living room. It went just that way. At about 3 p.m. the listeners heard eight guerrillas, including their commander, Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, stash their rifles in a corner and begin a shouting, thumping game. The army flashed the word to President Alberto Fujimori, who was across town at a divorce hearing with his estranged wife Susana. He instantly gave the order to attack. "We knew," he said later, "that it was the moment of minimum risk."
It was still a risk. The assault could have turned into a bloody disaster. But it didn't. It was a triumph--for Fujimori and for his much criticized military. Only 15 minutes after the commandos blasted and shot their way into the building, 71 of the hostages were free, all the guerrillas were dead, and only one prisoner and two soldiers had been killed (another soldier died several days later).
Fujimori had never seen much chance of resolving the standoff peacefully. From the beginning, last Dec. 17, when the rebels seized the embassy residence during a gala cocktail reception, Cerpa had demanded the release of 400 of his comrades who were locked in Peru's harsh prisons. That, Fujimori vowed, he would never agree to. He gave the negotiations a try, if only to mask preparations for the assault. He arranged the promise of safe passage to Cuba for the rebels if they wanted it and appointed Archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani as a special negotiator. After the raid, as the Archbishop expressed his sympathy to the families of the dead, he covered his tear-filled eyes with his hand.